Keep I.T. Simple Jonas Fagundes' Blog

Grails is a great framework, clean and powerful.

It was inspired by Rails. Rails is a good framework that proved the web development can be a lot easier. The drawback of rails is ActiveRecord, the database layer framework. ActiveRecord is a elegant solution for simple databases. The drawback is the last sentence is the "simple databases". It demands that the database was created with specific characteristics what make useless when you need to interface with a already defined database. If you cant change the database scheme to fit his limitations you have to drop rails from your project. It is not a bug, rails was designed that way, it was a conscientious choice between simplicity and functionality. But IMHO they oversimplified, but it works really well if you can design (or redesign) your database from scratch. In some environments this can be acceptable, in others don't.